


Loose lips sink ships (but not this time)

by bellamees



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Related, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt Bellamy, Hurt Clarke, Minor Finn Collins/Clarke Griffin, Post-Mount Weather, Protective Bellamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 21:29:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3355937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellamees/pseuds/bellamees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victory against Mount Weather didn’t go through as expected and winning the war doesn’t feel like a good thing. Both Bellamy and Clarke find demons to fight and words left unsaid in the darkness of a bunker as they wait for a storm to pass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose lips sink ships (but not this time)

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand Clarke/Bellamy stuck in a dark place is probably my favorite cliché. Also, I’m 100% in love with Bellamy being afraid of his feelings instead of the other way around. Oh — are Clarke’s eyes blue? I could swear they were green. Well, pretend I got it right. Let's pretend I also got the location of the White House right. Oops.

“Clarke.”

Bellamy spots Clarke sitting on a nearby dropship seat, legs curled under her like she’s some sort of a cat. There’s an absent look on her face, eyes stolid, arms crossed against her chest. That’s defensive Clarke — bitter, sullen, moody. Octavia told him she’s probably going through some post-Mount Weather trauma or something. They saved less than their 47, too many people around them died. Bellamy still reeks of other people’s blood, even if no one can tell anymore. It’s under his nails, an eery reminder of faces he couldn’t save. Clarke herself was badly hurt, staining the floor under him all ugly shades of red. Still, that was over a month ago, most people have moved on. They’ve lived in an awkward sensation of peace ever since.

“Are you okay?”

Her eyes focus on him, wistful. He always asks her that, and her answer is always the same. A frail “I’m okay, Bellamy”. Yet she’s not, he knows it, she knows it, _everyone_ knows it. Bellamy doesn’t remember last time Clarke felt like old Clarke, all fierce and greatness. “I’ve been better,” Clarke’s voice is croaky, unhappy. “It’s just—”

She groans, frustrated. _It’s all my fault_. Bellamy knows that’s what’s she’s thinking, what she wants to say but never does — he can hear her from his tent, at night, through her nightmares. He looks around Camp. People are going about their ordeals, building, planting, searching, playing, living, protecting each other. He spots Octavia and Indra in deep conversation in a corner, Raven giving orders to that engineer guy whose name he never really caught, even Murphy and his guns. Bellamy and Clarke look detached against the busy enviroment, standing still, like time’s just passing them by.

“Get up, let’s go somewhere,” he proposes, offering her a hand. Clarke’s empty eyes flicker from his hand to his face, but she doesn’t move an inch. “You need some walking.”

“What I need is—”

“Some walking,” Bellamy counters, reaching out to grab her arm, lightly enough to avoid hurting her, but strongly enough to make her stand. Her face is displeased, reminescent of the days hate was all that was going on between them. “Let’s go, princess.”

They leave Camp Jaha behind with the promise they’ll be alright, _we’ll be safe, Lexa’s people won’t harm us, we know our way around, yes, I’m taking a gun_. They wander for a while through skinny trees and tall trees and elevated hills and streams of water, stumbling on roots and skipping strange-looking plants. Clarke doesn’t complain, and Bellamy feels like there’s a bit of a color coming back to her face among all that nature and pale light. Her eyes are colored again, that pretty shade of green he’s certain would have fancier names in literature. “You’re staring,” Clarke says, turning her face away. “Where are we going anyway?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Bellamy—”

Bellamy stops abruptly, turning to grab Clarke’s shoulders and bring her to a hault. Her eyes widen, but she’s not scared of him, she never once was. He doesn’t want her to be, ever — so he softens his touch, his hands gently brushing down her arms, in a gesture he hopes it’s reassuring. “Mount Weather was not your fault, you have to know that.”

“I know,” Clarke’s gaze is steady and she nods, exhaling all the air she was keeping in her lungs for the past month. “Thank you for saying that.”

It still isn’t proper okay, but it’s a start. They resume their walking, silently going through the woods like ghosts, listening for animals or birds, and Bellamy is the one doing most of the small talk. It takes them half a day, four apples, three stops, and a lot of miles until they reach what Bellamy is looking for.

The ruins are taller than any other they’d found before, towering over some of the trees. Still, the building itself is barely there anymore, except for the foundation and some stronger walls. It spreads all around them, now consumed in vegetation and bird nests. Nature has taken everything back after that apocalypse, conquering whatever humanity left behind. There are broken marbles stairs and empty squares where windows should have been, and a coppery, burnt out signed that’s damaged by time, but still very much legible.

“The White House,” Clarke mutters, touching the plaque like it can disappear at any second. “This is amazing.”

Bellamy lets himself smile, even though she doesn’t look at him to notice. Clarke walks around, touching and looking and feeling, and Bellamy watches her from the stairs. He had hoped she’d like it, he’d imagined her face there, among History. It’s such a beautiful sight he finds it quite hard to breathe. “Do you like it?” his voice echoes through time and glassless windows. Clarke turns, a small smile on her lips. She opens her mouth to say something, eyes full of wonder, but thunder reverberates around them, shaking their souls. Cold, nasty rain starts pouring down on them, freezing up their bones, making them shiver. Bellamy motions for Clarke to follow him and soon they’re both storming down cement stairs into an old bunker some miles south, drenched, pale, their clothes heavy and soggy.

“Presidential bunker,” Bellamy says, guiding them slowly through the dark. He doesn’t have to touch Clarke to know she’s there while he lights some of the remaining LED flashlights from the Ark. He can feel her bones rattling a few steps away from him. The flashlight makes washed out shadows grow big on the ugly walls around them, but the bunker is too wide for its small power cells. They walk around, finding locked doors they can’t open, a small office chamber, and a scavenged bedroom full of bunkbeds. In a unspoken agreement, both of them start grabbing all the sheets they can still find, removing wet jackets (and pants, and none of them looks), shoes are left behind, and they find comfort in the office filled with dying copies of century-old books and journals. It has carpeted floor, moldy and foul-smelling. It doesn't matter, it’s dry Heaven.

“Did you know about this place?” Clarke asks, from behind the decrepid looking desk, fingers touching the pages of yellow, old paper.

“Yeah,” he shrugs.

Her lips press together and Bellamy knows she wants to scold him for never telling — at least some of the remaining matresses were just slightly crippled and could still be used. Clarke says nothing, prefering to move her eyes away from him, and Bellamy sees the blackness taking shape inside her pupils, conquering the green, making everything about her start to crumble into sad, torn little pieces. He wants her to scream at him, to tell him he was reckless and selfish — something, _anything_. Bellamy hates how she’s fading away and he can’t reach out to her.

“Clarke.”

Clarke shakes, and, for a second, Bellamy’s heartbeat stops inside his ribcage, because her face is all broken. And then — for his utter horror — she starts crying. Bellamy has never seen Clarke cry like that, not in front of him at least, not in such a sorrowful way. Everything about her lament presses hard against his heart, making it shrink and hurt, and he doesn’t stop himself before walking around the table to stand on his knees in front of her, pulling Clarke into a hug, ignoring their lack of proper clothes, ignoring the loud buzzing on his ears telling him to stay away. It reminds him so much of Octavia and her whimpering and how badly he couldn’t make it stop. The memory scares him — so he holds Clarke tighter, as if his body could fragment her pain and consume it, so she doesn’t have to feel it anymore; just like he used to do with Octavia.

She cries for a long time, sometimes just soft whimpers, sometimes sobs, sometimes tossing and trashing against his arms, violent and angry. And then Clarke settles, out of breath, tired, empty. Bellamy realizes it’s time to let go of her and he does so, softly, fingers grasping her arms as if to steady her, to make sure she’s still okay. He stays there, kneeling in front of her chair, ready to catch her if she needs. Clarke’s eyes are clear green, the dullness and pain washed away with her tears.

“Thank you,” her voice is soft, but she cleans her throat, and then it’s like seeing Clarke rebuild herself, how there’s iron pouring all through her veins again. She stops shaking, mantaining a resolute façade; it wavers, like a blurred out hologram, and he wonders if it’s all pretend. Bellamy doesn’t move away. “For everything.”

“You scared me just now,” he lets himself breathe, scanning her face for any remains of heartache. There are and there aren't. “You really—”

Bellamy has to cut his speech short, because Clarke is reaching out towards him, her hand white and cold, and then his breathing is going all wrong, his sight getting blurry, and it’s more painful than he’d like it to be. Her fingers grasp so, _so_ delicately a scar right above his temples, a pasty patch of pink skin. He stares wildly into her eyes, searching for any explanation for her behaviour, but she doesn’t look at him, no, not him. She’s looking at particles of his face, the tiny scars, the freckles, the dry lips.

“This was Dax.” _Yes_ , he agrees silently, but his body is frozen in place, his knees starting to hurt. “He could have killed you.”

“That was long time ago,” he forces the words out, everything in his body failing to function. His brain starts overthinking, like it often does whenever Clarke’s around, and his heart, well, she probably can hear it. He hates getting so shaken by touches and glances and smiles and _her voice_ , but he does. “You saved me, remember?” There’s so much meaning behind his words he rather not think about them. The implications. The explanations. Bellamy does what he always does, then. He takes a step back, letting himself walk away from her, slowly getting control of his own body. Clarke’s hand falls limp on her lap.

He settles on his chair again, on the other side of the table, safely shielded from his own feelings. They scare him, just like a crying Clarke. In the dark they stay for a little longer, listening to water drip, to the restless wind up above them, the screaming storm. Clarke eventually starts humming, eyes closed, yawning once in a while. Bellamy wonders if it’s already dusk. Probably. Maybe past that. He fidgets with the papers, watching Clarke, anxious, as if the mushy darkness could crawl back into her soul at any given time. When she opens her eyes again, though, they’re still green.

“You never told me,” she starts. “What happened to you at Mount Weather.”

“Clarke, that’s over—”

“I sent you there, you were alone. I can’t—”

“Clarke, stop!”

His voice grows impatient, and Clarke looks mad. Bellamy starts thinking everything was just a really bad idea. She won’t drop the subject, it’s not like her, he knows it, she’ll make him remember. Truth is, Bellamy doesn’t want to remember Mount Weather. He doesn’t want to aknowledge it ever happened, the torture, the bleeding, the hopelessness. He’s free, he’s gone through, it won’t happen again as long as he can help it. But Clarke’s there, and her eyes are sharp and alive, like old Clarke. Bellamy lets himself bask in them before shaking his head, resolute.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Clarke hands hover over his before touching them, fiddling with his fingers. It’s all wrong, her fingers failing to find their way through his, and maybe she’s nervous, who knows — Bellamy doesn’t complain when she finally settles their hands together, holding tight and sure.

“I promise I won’t let anyone hurt you like that again.” Bellamy thinks he should be the one saying that, but he doesn’t mind it’s Clarke instead.

“I know.”

“I can’t lose you, okay?” And this time she says it in a voice that makes him think she’ll start crying again. It’s kind of choked and somewhat emotional, and her hold gets stronger, pulling his arms in, as if she needs another hug. Bellamy feels like he could throw up his heart right then and there. “I just can’t.”

Until this moment, Bellamy had never named whatever his feelings were. Clarke’s a friend. Clarke’s his best friend, besides Octavia. Clarke’s his only friend, besides Octavia. Should he dwell amidst the list of adverbs and verbs surrouding his feelings and her, he’d often find himself short of breath, staring at her face, a dull pain on his chest that would not go away. The reality is there’s no space for them. There’s no space for something so fragile, that he can’t protect forever. Bellamy’s so afraid of hurting Clarke he rather not have her at all. He had seen what happened to her and Finn, what happened to _her_. _It’ll be easy to let go, it’ll be easy to forget_. It’s all very much bullshit, of course. It’s love alright — not like the one he feels for his sister — but the kind he never felt at all.

_Take a step back, Bellamy._

“We should go.”

His pants are still wet, but he gets dressed anyway, ignoring her lingering hands over the table, her distressed look. He can’t let her get hurt. His soggy boots make gawky sounds on the floor, Clarke doesn’t move at all. “Aren’t you getting your stuff?” She sighs, getting up, avoiding his sideway glances, avoiding contact. They move silently around each other, like the air’s electric, like there’s a current in their bodies. It feels like it. Bellamy doesn’t want to know what would happen if he were to touch her. They gather whatever they can take back to Camp, working together through the darkness, in a well-rehearsed dance, _their_ dance.

Clarke reaches the stairs first, climbing the first few steps up before coming to a hault and turning to look at him. She’s taller now, towering over him, her hair white from their flashlight, eyes so light the color’s almost gone. Bellamy thinks she looks like a ghost, haunting and beautiful and scary. She stares at him, and there’s dare and heart inside her eyes, a glorious combination of everything Bellamy ever loved about her. There’s no step back when she kisses him. There’s no line of thought, there’s no warning, no words spoken in between. At some point he’s not holding folded blankets anymore, but her body instead, and he does it gently, careful not to harm her — Clarke, no, Clarke is devastatingly eager, and she tastes like a ridiculous combination of salty tears and sweet red apples.

She ends the kiss first, and Bellamy searches frantically inside her eyes the reflection of his own feelings. There’s confusion and pain and desire, there’s _so much_ , he’s lost in it. He looks up at her and he knows there’s love written all over his face. Clarke still has her hands on the sides of his face, and her fingers brush his skin, burning. Bellamy’s holding her waist through the damp fabric of her clothes, thinking he’ll probably decay as soon as he lets go of her. “Why?” It’s a stupid question, Bellamy knows that. But he has to know.

“I—” her voice is low, her face is slightly pink, lips parted, Bellamy can’t concentrate properly on anything else. If the freaking apocalypse were about to happen again above their heads he’d have probably missed it. “Of all people. You stood by me everytime.”

“Not everytime,” Bellamy offers her a bitter smile, his neck getting hotter, face flushed. She probably can feel it on the tip of her fingers. Maybe is how close they are, maybe is the sad realization he had done so much to harm her once (or twice, or more).

“When it _mattered_ ,” Clarke’s hands grasp his face a little harder, as if she wants to make his brain aknowledge her feelings through the palm of her hands. “You’ve done good, Bellamy.”

There’s Clarke repeating old words again. Bellamy smiles, because his body feels like it’s being floated out of the Ark — those first miliseconds before being sucked out into outer space to die. He never felt zero gravity, but he likes to think it’s pretty similar to what he’s feeling right now. Clarke smiles back. “It’s still raining,” she says, looking up the bunker’s heavy hatch door. “We could just stay here.” Clarke grins, and Bellamy feels pathetically nervous. He’s slept with far too many people since coming down to the Ground, but Clarke has a very special way of making him somehow uncomfortable.

“They need their princess back at the Camp,” he tells her with an apologetic smile. “They’ll be worried about you.”

Clarke nods and sighs, finally agreeing, and her hands let go of him. They still stand there awkwardly in front of each other, unmoving, waiting for whatever needs to happen now. Bellamy wants to kiss her again, but then her face changes a little, a tiny splash of pain drifting back into her eyes. “You’ll tell me one day?” Clarke says, and his train of thought is lost because _damn, Clarke_. Of course she won’t drop the Mount Weather subject, and Bellamy turns to go pick their blankets up again, away from her, downstairs. His whole body shakes with frustration. “Please.”

“You sure knows how to kill the mood, princess,” he hates how his voice sounds so rushed and loud and angry like he’s attacking her, but he can’t help it. It rises with every word as he look at Clarke on the top of stairs, like a War Goddess, all white and yellow and opaque blues. “They tortured me. They kept me in a fucking cage. They bled me. Happy now?”

“I just—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Clarke,” Bellamy wants to push past her and go outside again, because the underground starts feeling too much like his cage, heavy, small, and his breathing system starts failing. He throws her a nasty look, full of misery, full of resentment. “It was worth the risk, right?” Bellamy hates himself the moment the words come out of his mouth because they don’t mean anything, not really, not at all, and he can’t breathe, _can’t breathe_.

It takes her less than a second to be by his side, holding him tightly, and they stumble onto the dirty cement of the ground, Bellamy’s body suddenly too weak to keep him standing. Clarke guides him through the darkness of the panic attack, as his eyes get blind and his lungs burn all over. She whispers in his ears, and it takes him a while to understand her, _It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, you’re okay, you’re safe_. He can finally concentrate enough to listen to her heartbeat, and he counts them, while Clarke chants and whispers. Oxygen finally flows through his body again, and he sees the contours of walls and Clarke.

“I’m sorry I ever said that.” Her voice is delicate, and Clarke’s body feels stiff all of a sudden. Bellamy lets himself rest against her, taking shallow breaths, feeling frayed. “I was wrong.”

“It had to be done,” he finally speaks. “We’ve all done things.”

Bellamy crawls out of her arms, sitting back, feeling tired. The vertigo of their kiss lost amidst his shaky feelings. He wants to go back to that, but it feels wrong now. Like it happened in some sort of alternative universe where neither of them have hurt each other. He can’t pretend her dismiss didn’t break whatever feelings he had back then, because it did — but it doesn’t mean his feelings vanished at all. He just had to put them back together. Clarke gets up and offers him a hand, which he takes. The flashlight falters, they stand in the pitch darkness for a couple of seconds, holding each other’s hands. Bellamy is at loss at how much he actually needs her, at how much he was — _is_ — willing to do anything for her, at the expense of his own life.

“When I heard your voice on that radio,” Clarke says, and neither of them is looking at each other, standing awkwardly in front of the stairs, looking up at their way out, her hand clasping his harder and harder, as if she’s scared he’ll slip away. “That’s when I knew.”

“Clarke, you don’t have to do this.” His heart feels like it’s made out of marble inside his chest, heavy and jagged. If Clarke were to push him into a river, he’d drown by the weight of it. Bellamy tries to focus on the feeling of her skin, how cold her hands are, how her nails feel against his fingers. He doesn’t want to say it, he _can’t_ say it. The implications. The explanations. _Step away, Bellamy_. “We don’t have to do this,” he repeats, changing his pronouns, voice calm.

She finally agrees, a slight shake of her head, eyes closed. Bellamy stares, waiting. They’re still green when she opens them, looking back at him. “We’ll figure this out,” she’s saying. Bellamy thinks of the stories his mother used to tell him and Octavia, about Psyche and Eros, all those trials and tribulations she had to go through, just because he was the one to fall in love. “For now we could stay here. A little longer.”

They stay overnight, bodies close on the small bunk beds, holding each other, until they’re dry enough, until the feelings have sank, until there’s no more storm, no more rain. Bellamy barely sleeps, the dimness inside his eyelids keeping him awake, Clarke’s body making his own wallow in terrifying delight. Morning comes sooner than he hoped for, and before he knows it they’re taking their way back to Camp. They shut down the bunker’s hatch together, leering into its darkness, and Bellamy leaves his ugly parts there, and their kiss, and her cries. It’s all gone now. _We’ll figure something out_.

“Thank you for this, for taking me there,” Clarke tells him at some point. She’s walking ahead of him, and when she turns back to look at him, Bellamy forgets how to breathe. “I feel better. I needed it.”

He wants to know what she means by _it_ , but Bellamy won’t ask. “Yeah, sure,” he says instead. “I needed it, too, I guess.”

Clarke stands there until he catches up with her, stopping himself before getting too close. She offers him her hand again, and when he touches it, it doesn’t feel cold anymore. Clarke’s warm against the chilly breeze around them. “We can start like this,” her face gets a flush of pretty pink, but her eyes are serious and alight. Bellamy fights a staggering want to kiss her again.

“Whatever you say, princess,” he beams at her, being taken over by that floating sensation once more. “But I don’t want to be shot to death, so I’ll have to let go when we get near Camp.”

“I won’t let that happen.” Bellamy was just being flirty, but there’s something in Clarke’s voice that gets to him. It’s that reassuring thing she has going on, whenever she transforms from a brave princess to a proper queen. She says it so fiercely, it’s not silly flirting anymore. And Bellamy feels the same, except he often fails to convey his feelings same way she does, in sheer bluntness.

“I know.”

 _I’ll keep you safe, too_ , that’s what his words mean. They both know, even if it’s unspoken and unrealistic. Both resume walking, and it takes them half of their day to get back to Camp. Bellamy lets go of her hand just in time, his palm feeling sweaty and suddenly useless without hers. He watches her go back into being old Clarke, the leader, sliding back into her position as soon as they’re there, his chest heaving with a sense of pride. He brought her back, like he promised — all of her, and not just broken pieces. Clarke jerks her head towards him through the small crowd of people around her, and he can read what’s on her eyes. _We’ll figure something out, won’t we?_

So he nods, from afar. _Yes, we will._


End file.
